Pagina's

Courtesy of Sir Henry Morgan, we have the example of how the EU-rocrats think about their subjects. The European Weekly, an official EU publication writes:

The security, liberty and prosperity of hundreds of millions of European citizens ask for complex leadership actions, which cannot be appreciated by heterogeneous populations, from the point of view of the information level and the education one.

Just sit back and let that sink in for a while...

In the mean time ratification goes on, as the EU foreign ministers decided yesterday evening. Our own FM Maxime Verhagen (r.) declared (NL) the Lisbon Treaty Turnip not dead and not off the table. In the UK calls for a halt to the ratification process are getting louder, but for the moment Brown is holding out.

For the real nitty-gritty you would do well to read EU Referendum. On their Umbrella Blog you can link through a veritable treasure of interesting and well-informed commenting on the present situation.

In short: The EUrocrats are determined to have the Turnip in force some time in 2009 and as things are going now, they may just get their wish after all. But it would seem to us that in the longer term, however, the EUnion is in big, big trouble. The Irish No has taken away the last bit of legitimacy the Turnip might have had.

Not that it ever had much to begin with. In its first incarnation as the 'Constitution' the Turnip was roundly rejected in two of the four referenda that were held on it. This time around there was only one and it got trounced again. The question of 'What part of 'No' do they not understand?' has been heard loudly around cyber space, the answer to which we are still waiting on, of course.

The EUnion and it's flunkies in national governments still denies that the Turnip is dead after Ireland said 'No', in blatant disregard of their own rules, which stipulated that all, every single member, must ratify for the Turnip to come into force. Not 50 % + 1, not 27 - 1, but all of them. That rather hamfisted EUrocrat denial was as clear an explanation of the nature of the EUnion as any eurosceptic publication could ever manage: The EUnion doesn't do democracy. Or Rule of Law, for that matter.

The EU's talk of democracy is a deception. The EU speaks with a forked tongue. Democracy is the greatest of all threats to the EU, it is the sworn enemy of the bureaucrats. The EU is angry. It can no longer hide its contempt, indeed hatred, of democracy and that is why the rules are being ignored and the EU Constitution - masked as the Lisbon Treaty - will continue to be enshrined through the complicity of the political class in member states, with all due haste in defiance those stated rules. The prize at stake is too great to let rules get in the way.

But what the EUrocrats apparently do not realize is that with all these shenanigans the EUnion itself, and the political classes is member states that went along, have suffered a major blow to their own authority and legitimacy, one that may prove fatal.

Not in the immediate future. Matters EU are never urgent enough for most people. But the image of national and EUnion politicos going through with a treaty that nobody wants, with a slow motion coup d'etat that would replace our own governments with a one-size-fits-all burocracy against our wishes, will have a corrosive effect. It will be the democratic acid that is slowly dissolving the popular mandate that any government needs to stay in power. They all may finally have overplayed their hand.